Whipping Boy

The Forty-year Search for My Twelve-year-old Bully

"From the acclaimed author of A CASE OF CURIOSITIES, Allen Kurzweil's stranger-than-fiction "investigative memoir", detailing his 40-year-search for his boarding school bully who tied him up at the age of twelve and whipped him to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar, and who went on to lead a mad-cap life of international crime and financial fraud"--"The true account of one boy's lifelong search for his boarding-school bully.Equal parts childhood memoir and literary thriller, Whipping Boy chronicles prize-winning author Allen Kurzweil's search for his twelve-year-old nemesis, a bully named Cesar Augustus. The obsessive inquiry, which spans some forty years, takes Kurzweil all over the world, from a Swiss boarding school (where he endures horrifying cruelty) to the slums of Manila, from the Park Avenue boardroom of the world's largest law firm to a federal prison camp in Southern California.While hunting down his tormentor, Kurzweil encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux royal swindlers, a crime investigator "with paper in his blood," and a onocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil's riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the "parallel lives" of a victim and his abuser.A scrupulously researched work of nonfiction that renders a childhood menace into an unlikely muse, Whipping Boy is much more than a tale of karmic retribution; it is a poignant meditation on loss, memory, and mourning, a surreal odyssey born out of suffering, nourished by rancor, tempered by wit, and resolved, unexpectedly, in a breathtaking act of personal courage.Whipping Boy features two 8-page black-and-white photo inserts and 83 images throughout"--Viciously bullied at an English boarding school at the age of ten, the author describes his adult quest for revenge when he discovers that his tormentor was recently released from prison for his role in an illegal scheme.

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I couldn't even finish it. My tolerance for poor, poor, pitiful rich white men is low to begin with, but his writing wasn't insightful or yearning, just merely whiny. I hated him so profoundly about about page 20 that not even the indignities he endured could stir any sense of compassion in me--and I take pride, as a rule, in my empathy for my fellows.

Part way through this book I considered it most trivial [a fellow attending the most expensive schools, beginning with this book's coverage of the Swiss boarding school, claiming to be middle-class???], but the financial scam and the people scammed in the second half is worth the read - - really hilarious, and you can't believe these saavy people could be so easily duped. [The typical scam you read from some Nigerian email daily: send us all your money, and will send you money, or in this case a super-sized loan. It sort of reminded me of the bizarre prosecution of Enron, legal chief in charge being Mary Jo White - - Obama's person to head the SEC??? Enron had thousands of offshore SPVs hiding the debt, yet somehow White decides to prosecute them on entirely other grounds??? As if forensic accounting never existed????]